Blog Index

Next Feature

Feature Highlight: GSatTrack - Trip Report

Being able to accurately monitor the performance of fleet assets over time is the cornerstone of running an efficient fleet operation. GSatTrack collects, analyzes, and summarizes the most commonly used information in the Trip Report.

What is a Trip?

Before analyzing a trip report it’s important to understand how a trip is defined. In the broadest sense, a trip is any journey that an asset makes. Since GSatTrack supports a multitude of devices with different capabilities, what constitutes a calculated trip within the report can sometimes vary.

In a traditional setup, fleet devices will report their ignition status to the portal, allowing operators to track when vehicles are powered on and in use. For such devices, a trip is simply defined as any period between an ignition on and ignition off.

Think of someone entering a vehicle, turning it on, hopefully driving it somewhere, parking and turning it off. They’ve just taken a trip in that vehicle.

Should your device not support ignition events, a fallback mechanism is used to calculate the trips. A trip start is subsequently defined as any movement above walking speed (approx. 5 kph); a trip end any prolonged movement under walking speed (at least 5 minutes under 5 kph) or any prolonged period (30 minutes) with no follow-up position reports.

What do these fields mean?

Once you’ve run a Trip Report on one or more of your assets it is important to have a solid understanding of the data in order to utilize it for decision making. Note that the fields relating to fuel consumption may be absent from your report if your device does not track them.

Trip time – The total time that a trip has taken, calculated from the difference of trip start and trip end times.

Travel time – The time during a trip that the asset was moving (not idle).

Idle time – The time during a trip where the asset was idling. An asset is idling if it is stationary for any period of time during the trip.

Stopped time – The time the asset was stopped before the next trip started; the time between trips taken.

Duty cycle – The percentage of time during the report period that the asset was taking a trip. Calculated by dividing total report time by total trip time. For assets reporting ignition this will also equate to the period of time the vehicle was powered on.

Distance traveled – The total distance traveled during the trip or report period. If your device reports odometer values they will be used. Otherwise, GPS distance (as a bird flies) is used to determine distance.

Fuel consumption – For assets reporting fuel consumption, the amount of fuel consumed in the trip or report period.

Average fuel efficiency – The fuel efficiency is calculated by taking the distance traveled divided by the amount of fuel consumed for the trip or report period.

Idle fuel consumption – The amount of fuel consumed while the asset was idling.

Average speed – Average speed is calculated by taking the total distance of the trip(s) and dividing it by the trip time. E.g. a 100 km trip that took two hours would have an average speed of 50 kph.

Max speed – The maximum speed as reported by the device during the trip or report period. This is based solely on the positions reported by the device so it is possible the asset had a faster instantaneous speed in-between reports.

Non-trip – Non-trip items are any positions that are reported outside of a trip. Either positions that are recorded while ignition is off or stationary positions before any movement is detected if ignition is not being reported.

How can I use this information?

Many insights can be gained by analyzing the plethora of information offered by the trip report. You can quickly tell if your assets are performing efficiently or whether they have cost or safety issues. Monitoring idling and fuel efficiency over time can help you determine whether specific routes are more cost effective for your vehicles or if a potential maintenance issue is affecting performance. The overall asset data can also help you determine if your fleet is simply being utilized to its full potential.

How can I get the most out of this report?

Choose and configure your tracking devices to include the most information as possible about your vehicles. Often the additional cost of a more fully-featured asset tracker will quickly return on its additional investment by helping to pinpoint issues with your fleet. The more data you have the more insight you can make on how your assets are performing.

END

About the Author

Ryan Ross

Director of Software Engineering

Ryan Ross is a software developer with over 20 years of experience and passion in all areas of the software development life cycle. Joining GSE in 2010, Ryan and his keyboard have played a role in the development, improvement and maintenance of virtually every internal and external GSE product.

More Information

For general inquiries, please contact sales@gsat.us. For more technical information, please contact support@gsat.us. You may also call us at +1.954.459.4000

Have any questions?

We understand there are problems that can not be solved by a product-in-a-box. If you have special requirements for your project, please contact us and we will provide you with a custom solution tailor-fit to your needs.